According to WAN-IFRA president Gavin O’Reilly, Google is missing the point: this is an issue of copyright (‘a deceptively simple legal principle’) and a lack of control options for publishers when it comes to search engines and aggregators indexing there content.

Vested interest on both sides, here’s the full audio of Drummond’s speech:

What did the crowd want? Calls for evidence, from both parties, of what conversations are going on between newspaper groups, representative bodies and Google; and progress, so the debate might be different next year…

The Independent has tried its hand at an interactive map plotting the challenges currently being faced, and those looming in the future, by the newspaper industry:

(Apologies if some of the argument bubbles are out of the frame – just drag on the arrows to bring them into view)

Good summary of the key issues using DebateGraph – the map draws on arguments from Jeff Jarvis, Roy Greenslade and Gavin O’Reilly amongst others. Some links to some prominent reports/blog posts/comment pieces expressing these arguments would be a great addition.

You can rate the arguments made and add new points after registering. As users rank ideas, the strongest and weakest arguments will be shown by the size of the arrows connecting them.

“Sir Anthony O’Reilly, the chief executive of the Independent’s owner Independent News & Media, has announced he will retire in May, with his son Gavin O’Reilly replacing him with immediate effect,” reports MediaGuardian.

We are writing on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum, which represent 18,000 publications in 102 countries, to welcome the extension of the relaxation in media regulations, but also to call on you to take further steps to uphold international standards of press freedom.

In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, your government introduced new rules that allowed foreign journalists greater freedom to travel in the country without prior government permission and to talk to anyone who was willing to be interviewed. Those regulations were set to expire on 17 October, however, shortly before they expired new regulations were introduced that recognise these rights.

While welcoming the extension of the more relaxed regulations for foreign journalists, we are concerned that they do not extend to domestic journalists and that many fundamental rights necessary for the proper functioning of a free press are not observed. For example, there is no protection of news sources, it is not possible to report freely on Tibet and hotels are obliged to report the arrival of a foreign journalist to police. Furthermore, with more than 30 journalists and at least 50 cyber reporters imprisoned, China jails more journalists than any other.

We respectfully call on you to extend the relaxed regulations to domestic journalists, to introduce further reforms so that your country might fully respect international standards of press freedom, and to ensure that all
those detained for exercising their right to freedom of expression are immediately released from prison.

INM has adopted a ‘platform agnostic’ policy for growing its media, O’Reilly wrote in a comment responding to Greenslade, and is not investing in print at the expense of online.

“[T]he O’Brien saga is a distraction from the stark reality facing a company that has put its faith in the longevity of newsprint and averted its gaze from the digital future. It has invested online, of course, but it is way behind many other newspaper companies,” Greenslade wrote, likening INM to a ‘digital ostrich’.

According to O’Reilly, the facts speak for themselves:

INM online revenues grew by 111.5% last year and its 100 websites attract 12 million monthly unique users.

Reports of a ‘volatile’ advertising situation, he added, are not a result of print vs online or structural shifts within INM, but a result of the wider economic downturn.

Gavin O’Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers, nailed his colours firmly to the print mast in his speech at the opening ceremony of the 61st World Newspaper Congress in Gothenburg, Sweden:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has denied that Google’s resistance to using ACAP is based on ‘wanting to control’ publishers information, insisting that it is strictly a technology issues.

Speaking to iTWire, Schmidt said: “ACAP is a standard proposed by a set of people who are trying to solve the problem [of communicating content access permissions]. We have some people working with them to see if the proposal can be modified to work in the way our search engines work. At present it does not fit with the way our systems operate.”

According to iTWire, Schmidt went on to deny that Google’s reluctance so far to use the rights and permissions technology was because Google wanted as few barriers as possible between online content and its search engines. “It is not that we don’t want them to be able to control their information.”

Schmidt made his comments after a tit-for-tat exchange last week in which Gavin O’Reilly, chairman of World Association of Newspaper and ACAP CEO, reacted strongly to claims made by a senior Google executive that the search engine believed ACAP was an unnecessary system and that its function could be fulfilled by existing web standards.

The WAN president doesn’t seem smitten with the idea of multi-tasking journalists given this response to a question about converged journalism posed to him by Paul Horrocks, president of the SoE, during the Q&A on the opening night of the Society of Editors conference in Manchester.

“I don’t think that’s the core competency of writers… we are wordsmiths, not video and cameramen…”

The WAN president and COO of Independent News and Media crunches the numbers of internet advertising while talking about how a fragmented mix of media may be the key to capturing the necessary market for newspapers prosper.

Global online advertising market worth 21 billion (pounds or dollars?) he says. 65 per cent in the hands of three companies, all the rest are scrabbling over a much smaller (admittedly) growing online share.